While Annie Gell’s Kirkland & Ellis fellowship doesn’t conclude until next year, she doesn’t sound overly concerned about finding her next job in a tough economy. The Class of 2009 graduate, currently working at the Sanctuary for Families’ Center for Battered Women’s Legal Services, built an impressive resume of public interest work undertaken at Columbia Law School, from working at the Legal Aid Society in the Bronx to interviewing genocide survivors in Phnom Penh at the Documentation Center of Cambodia. The 27-year-old Gell, named Columbia Law School’s Outstanding Public Interest Student of the Year in 2008-09, also maintains her relationships with Ellen Chapnick, dean of Social Justice Initiatives, and the staff at the resource-rich Center for Public Interest Law.
And then there is her seemingly unquenchable drive to serve the public good, or as she puts it, “my theme of…being drawn to the underdog.”
Gell, who grew up in Bethesda, Maryland, first came to the Morningside Heights campus as an undergraduate at Columbia College. The Law School’s rigorous human rights initiatives helped convince her to stay and pursue her J.D. During her second year, Gell worked on a brief for the Jessica Gonzales v. United States of America case, which involves a woman whose three young daughters were abducted and killed in 1999 after police officers failed to enforce a restraining order against her estranged husband.
During the summer of 2008, she interned with the Documentation Center of Cambodia, an independent monitoring and advocacy group whose work intersects with the Extraordinary Chambers of the Courts of Cambodia. That tribunal was created by statute to bring to justice the surviving leaders of the Khmer Rouge government which killed 1.7 million people during its four-year reign in the late 1970s.
“There are very few Cambodians over the age of 35 or 40 because of mass killings by the Khmer Rouge,” says Gell. “All the paid employees at the center were Cambodian and in their 20s and 30s. I really felt like I was working with the future of Cambodia.”
Gell’s projects involved researching the confinement of the Khmer leaders to assess whether “the conditions met international human rights standards.” She also worked with the Victim Participation Project, which both collected stories of Khmer Rouge survivors and perpetrators (to possibly be used in the tribunal) and educated the young population about the regime itself.
Gell’s work at the New York City-based Sanctuary for Families, sponsored by the Law Firm of Kirkland & Ellis, brings her human rights work much closer to home. She is spearheading a new project and working to reunite immigrant domestic violence victims with their children who have been stranded abroad.
Relationships between Columbia, Sanctuary, and Kirkland run deep; Edward Sadtler, CC96, coordinates Kirkland’s relationship with Sanctuary for Families, which has involved the representation of over 50 Sanctuary clients in immigration matters.
Gell says, “My office works to help domestic violence victims secure the rights, benefits, and protections available to them under the law. And there are particular legal remedies for immigrant domestic violence victims under the Violence Against Women Act.”
These legal remedies include visas available to trafficking and crime victims, including survivors of domestic violence, which can eventually lead to lawful permanent resident status for them in the United States. However, many immigrant survivors of domestic violence suffer from the added complication of being separated from their children across international boundaries. This separation, which arises from causes that range from abduction of the children by the batterer back to the country of origin, to bureaucratic backlogs in visa processing can take years to resolve. “While there are legal pathways for reuniting immigrant families torn apart by domestic violence, this process of family reunification is a new and largely unexplored area in public interest advocacy. Through the Kirkland and Ellis Public Interest Fellowship, my colleagues and I at Sanctuary for Families are able to do this pioneering work.”
With her Columbia Law School foundation, sense of mission, and Kirkland & Ellis’ generosity, Annie Gell seems destined for a rewarding career in public interest law.
“I really couldn’t do anything else,” she says. “There are so many human rights challenges out there, and now as a graduate of Columbia Law, I have the opportunity to make a real difference.”
Watch Annie Gell '09 talk about her Human Rights Clinic experience at Columbia.
